The Origin Of The Mood Ring

In the immortal words of Woody Allen, this is a joke; that’s not a joke; but it is a joke. I have been told over and over and over and over that much of my work can be easily divided into a few categories; rather like a cheap Chinese Restaurant Menu. I would often be asked to program concerts and create compilation albums based on a particular ‘mood’ because most listeners are doing so for a purpose.

When I put together the compilation album Nice Cuts, the original idea was, in fact, to release several discs; each focusing on one of these categories. But I decided against it in favour of letting fans vote for their choices. The dirty little secret is that I altered the results of this poll slightly to make certain I included a spectrum of choices from each of these categories. In other words, despite all my railing about the purity of the album as artform, internally, I had drunk the kool-aid.

In short, the halcyon days of yore when one sat down to listen to Dark Side Of The Moon as an activity per seé are as gone as the venerable mood ring itself. So I cobbled this together one afternoon as a response. ‘One from Column A’… You get won-ton with that.

But then it dawned on me that some way to ‘sample’ is not a totally bad idea. Certainly one can’t get an idea of the contents of my albums from the titles. So all kidding aside, it seems reasonable to provide a way to sample according to even imperfect categories.

The categories, however are a joke. At least, I hope they are. But since they have been identified by many people over the course of many years, it’s hard to know for sure. If you have a better taxonomy in mind? I’m all ears.